Top 5 common mistakes in blogging marketing (and how to get better results)

According to HubSpot, the top inbound marketing strategy for marketers is blogging. Specifically, 53% of marketers use blogging marketing as their primary content creation method.

If you think about it, we are more likely to watch a video, read a blog post, or listen to a podcast than to click on an ad.

Any business could benefit from content marketing, especially seeing how easy it has become to set up a blog.

However, it is getting harder to grab the attention of an audience due to the increased amount of content that runs online.

As saturated as the web may be, if you create the right processes and use the proper strategies, there is always a way. As the saying goes, “if there is a will, there is a way,” so don’t get discouraged as I will be giving you 5 of the most common mistakes in blogging marketing and will be showing you how you can fix them.

But first, what is the purpose of blogging marketing?

In general, those who blog are publishers of content. Publishers then “rent” part of their space for others to advertise such as a side bar ad or a pop-up ad.

As a content marketer, you are both the publisher and the advertiser. You create high-quality content, and through content (blog posts) and your digital space (website), you advertise your own products and services.

If you are writing blog posts to expand your company's exposure and advertisement efforts, you are performing blogging marketing.

The end goal is to get more leads and convert more of those leads into clients, but you have to remember at all times that you are both the publisher and advertiser.

It is essential to remind ourselves at all times of the purpose of a blogging marketing strategy.

Without further due, here are the top mistakes in blogging marketing.

Mistake #1: Not providing value in exchange for a lead

Before I get into this mistake, in reality, mistake number zero is not collecting leads.

If you are not collecting emails or any other sort of contact information from your readers then visitors will read, and once they are done and exit, they will most likely never come back. You will never get to monetize your content marketing strategy without any leads.

Now that you have fixed mistake number zero, you need to find a proper strategy to get those leads.

Blogging marketing is NOT cheap. It takes a lot of resources to come up with a blog post that is valuable and grabs the attention. For this reason, you need to spend as much effort and time to gathering leads than you are to writing content.

The best way to get someone to subscribe to your email list is to offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their email address.

In order to make it worth their while, the free resource you offer has to be useful and valuable to them. Otherwise, they will not provide you with their email.

When offering a free resource, this may be a discount, free trial, document, e-book, guide, tutorial, premium access code, or anything that you can think of that is highly valuable for your audience and that they will give you their email in exchange for it.

The common mistake here is that by only having a subscription box and no incentive, your audience will not give you their email (low conversion-rate). You have to offer something that is irresistible and provide content that will make visitors want to receive more emails from you.

If you gave them your email, they would give you the “Facebook Ad Template Library” which is an irresistible offer for other marketers using Facebook Ads. They knew their target audience was interested in something that would help them improve their ad results and created an excellent lead magnet.

Clearly, it worked.

Mistake #2: Not writing useful content for your audience

The whole idea of being a publisher is creating content that either entertains, informs or inspires. Publishers create engaging material to get the attention of an audience then introduce ads to make money.

Many businesses engaging in blogging marketing forget that to be successful in this area, they must be publishers FIRST and advertisers SECOND.

Without an audience's attention, you cannot advertise to them. Or at least, you will not have anyone seeing your ads.

If you are writing content that is purely promotional or content that isn’t any more valuable than other articles online, you are NOT going to get the engagement you need to start capturing leads.

After reading the above, many of you may be wondering what the key to creating engaging content for an audience is.

Here it is:

Understanding so profoundly your target audience that you know their struggles, pain-points, challenges, goals, lifestyle, thinking-process, and as much as you can about them.

You then can create content that is unique to them and will answer their questions, and that is very valuable to them.

If you relate to them, you will win.

Mistake #3: Not using headlines that generate clicks

You’ve spent hours and hours putting together a perfect blog post. The contents of this post are precious to your audience.

And you have indeed created a masterpiece.

But you don’t put too much thought into your headline or title, and once you share it online, no one decides to click on your article.

The headline of your blog post is the top element that will help your readers decide if they are going to read your content piece or not. It is as simple as that.

If you are spending 8 hours on a blog post, you better make sure you are not writing a 1-minute headline.

Do some research on viral posts in your niche and analyze their titles. You can even create a spreadsheet with the top headlines you find online.

The one thing that you have to be careful with is that when you make your title “click-bait,” the content that follows needs to deliver said value.

Let’s look at some examples of headlines for your blog posts (just replace what’s in the [brackets]):

[#] Powerful [desired result] tips (that actually work)

A step-by-step guide to [desired result]

The one thing that no [industry] expert is going to tell you

The simplest way to [desired result]

[#] common mistakes in [industry] (and how to fix them)

As you can see, you’ve probably run across titles like this (including this post). You can quickly go to other viral posts and make your template.

If you are not giving your audience guidance and reminding them to do specific actions, why would they think of doing them?

You may think that by providing valuable content, they might go and check-out your products or services.

Wrong.

As far as your reader is concerned, they are just in your blog post to get a question answered or learn something. They don’t care about your brand unless they’ve come across your content more than once.

You have to let them know there is more to explore and understand about your business.

Blogging marketing, as the term describes it, is about putting your brand in people’s mind by exposing them to your written content. Make it simple for them by giving them instructions.

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As you can see, there is a ton of examples, and you can have many of these through your blog post. Just remember not to be over promotional, and stay valuable in your blog post.

Clear call-to-action are A MUST in blog marketing.

To show you an example of this tip, I will use a Grammarly’s blog post. As you can see below, there is a button “Get Grammarly for free” in the middle of the article. On the left, we see buttons to share the post, and on the right, more valuable content. All of these are great call-to-action!

Mistake #5: Not optimizing for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

You do not stand a chance in the blogging world if no one can find your content. And yes, most of the time traffic comes from search engines (social media too, which I am hoping you are taking advantage of as well).

Search Engine Optimization is an industry by itself, and although it will take you some time to learn all the details, you should at the very least know the basics.

The mistake here is ignoring SEO as a whole. If you know this is important but have not at the very least Google it once, then you are fully committing this mistake.

Make sure you spend some time learning about this topic to have better results in your blogging marketing efforts.

We’ve now gone through all 5 top mistakes in blogging marketing. I hope that you will get the results that you are looking for by blogging.

If you have questions or would like to add something to this list, make sure you tell me in the comments section.

Lastly, make sure to share this with others that may be struggling with this as well!

Andres Tovar

Andres is the Owner and Administrator at Noetic Mindset as well as the Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer for the digital marketing agency Noetic Marketer. Andres is a marketing strategist and visionary who helps businesses grow.